THE A YOK lIlt - ... . '" - ,.. . ;'"""' :: ... = .". J J' \' II ... II ,.. ....-- _ :: It.:: 1m . J'\\\, 0 0 . . · 0 1\ . ". "" IÞ THE, TALK OF THE TOWN Notes and Comment T HE day after the morning papers returned to the newsstands, a couple of weeks ago, a chIlly fog moved in, and this year's long Indian summer was at an end. During the preVIOUS several weeks, the strike and the warm weather had conspIred to produce a uniquely relaxed and pleasur- able atmosphere in our city. Unre- corded by our newspaper of record, these splendid autumn days seemed to have dropped out of history; like sol- diers breaking ranks or children let out of school, they had been liberated from the disciplinary gaze of posterity , whose judgmental eye had blInked shut for a moment. The quality of time itself was altered. The hours passed at a more tranquil, measured pace, the way we imagined they must have done in past cen turies, when the news travelled at the speed of saIlboats and the latest in- formation from other continents was always several months old. Late one warm Sunday afternoon, during a walk in Central Park, we allowed ourself to imagine that all the conveyors of instantaneous news had fallen silent. As in our thoughts the news from Iran, Nicaragua, and China receded back over the horizon, the scene before our eyes seemed to grow in vividness, beau- ty, and importance. Our very senses seemed to sharpen, as though the air had grown purer and clearer and an incessan t, unnoticed background noise, as of traffic or aIr-conditioning, had suddenly ceased. Such imaginings were pleasant, but we were still glad when the p rin ted news from foreign parts began to flow again. The return of another kind of news was less welcome. In recent years, newspaper journalism has overflowed the traditional boundaries of "the " f 1 . news -events 0 genera Interest oc- curring in the public realm-and seeped into every corner of life. In- creasingly, the newspapers concern themselves not with the world "out there" but with the reader hImself- his habitat, his bank account, his body, his psyche, his soul. Psychiatrist-like, they invite him to take a deeper in- terest in his own existence. Life's daily round-its dinner menus, private quar- rels, and household furnIture-has be- come the subject matter of "stories," complete with banner headlines, and the result is that, as the newspapers have absorbed the atmosphere of pri- vate life, private life has been invaded by the nervous rhythms and breathless atmosphere of journalism. When the strike came, public events grew dim but daily life took on a lost freshness. The ordinary events of one's day shed a certain pawed-over, secondhand qual- ity and gained the newness and un- expectedness of found objects. The unrated meal at the restaurant was tastier, the evening at the unevaluated discothèque was more lively, the un- recommended emotion was more vivid, and the unannounced Indian-summer day was more radiant than any of them would have been with the new experts and judges looking over one's shoulder. Now they've returned, and we're all back in a world that contains more prose (SIX or seven pounds of it on Sunday) but less poetry than did our newspaper less hohday. . . Play O NE of the joys of the current dance season IS the N ew York City Ballet's revival of "Interplay," a bundle of choreographic high jinks that ] erome Robbins set to a jazzy score by Morton Gould way back in 1945. Although the ballet lasts only about twenty minutes, it is one of the trIck- iest works in the repertory to per- form well, since it requires not only formidable technique and enormous energy but a kind of wisecracking youthful insouciance that is not always visible in dedicated classical dancers. The theme of the ballet-the interplay between the severe, abstract patterns of classical dance and the loose, slangy jazz accents of the forties-is ex- pressed in four sections: Free Play, a joyous meeting between four girls and four boys; Horseplay, a flirtatious in- terlude; Byplay, a sinuous getting-to- know-you pas de deux; and Team Play, a boisterous athletic competition. The present revival uses twen ty very young dancers (three slightly overlap- ping casts of eIght dancers apiece, many of them just out of ballet school) , who bound through the choreography as if they were equipped with perma- nent springs, and who have been ab- sorbing the hip-swinging, jive-onented spirit of the period from Robbins him- self. We dropped in at one of the early rehearsals at the New York State Theatre and found Mr. Robbins-a trim, graceful man who has an oval face, deep-set brown eyes, a very high forehead, and a neat white beard- standing at the front of a bare stage coaching his dancers in some of the more difficult steps in the ballet. As a rehearsal pianist began to play a cheer- f ul syncopated tune, eight dancers muf- fled in layers of shirts, sweaters, baggy pants, and leg warmers fell into a neat diagonal line, pirouetted one by one in place ("W atcb your port de bras in the turns," said Mr. Robbins. "Be very clean about it"), and then divided into two' groups that moved around the stage clockwise and counterclockwise in a do- si-do. Moments later, the dancers sep- arated into couples; the boys tossed the girls across their backs and then somer- saulted forward to finish the first move- ment sitting on the floor, witb their partners standing behind them. Mr.